The Americans who worked with us on the Pablo Escobar issue couldn't accompany us on operations because you could pick them out in a group of a hundred men. Yes, that's one more difficulty facing them. Will it be harder to find Saddam because there is no local police force worthy of the name to help the Americans? The search for Escobar was a joint operation involving Colombian authorities as well as the U.S. If the person isn't using communications equipment, then the technology will be of no use to you, and that is presumably the case right now. But it all depends on whether the person is trying to put himself in contact with others. The technology available today to pinpoint the whereabouts of a person has a zero margin of error. How important a role does technology play in this kind of a search? You can work with the Army, as we did in Colombia, but the job of studying and analyzing the intelligence that will help you find the individual properly belongs to the police. Should the operation remain in the hands of the U.S. A person who really wants to hide isn't going to be found. If he lies low, it will take a long time to find him. presence in Iraq, he will surely be located more quickly. If he tries to get in touch with his friends or organize people to resist the U.S. Will the search for Saddam take a long time? He had a lot of information about politicians, military people and policemen who had taken bribes from him, and it would have been much better to learn about that. But we have our professional training, and at no time were we told to execute him if we ever managed to find him. Government officials and the public in general were almost unanimous in believing it was better for Escobar to be dead than alive. You can then bring the person to justice and make an example of him.īut after a certain point, wasn't the Colombian government actively trying to kill Escobar rather than capture him? In any search operation it's always better to capture the person alive. government try to capture him alive or just kill him? And the more he resembles the local people in appearance and accent, the more easily he will go unnoticed. The authorities will never find a person by searching for him door to door. I imagine that Saddam will want to be where he can blend in, where there are people who look like him, talk like him.īut won't the Americans figure that out and look for Saddam in precisely those kinds of surroundings? If Saddam goes to a region outside his native area, he is going to stand out. When Jose Rodriguez Gacha, the other head of the Medellin cartel, was hunted down and killed, Pablo Escobar said it was because Gacha had left his native region and gone to an area of coast where it would be very difficult to go unnoticed. I doubt he's in a small town because he would be more easily detected. Excerpts:ĬONTRERAS: Where do you think Saddam Hussein is hiding right now? Now a retired general, Martinez, 60, shared his thoughts about the search for Saddam Hussein last week with NEWSWEEK's Joseph Contreras. But Martinez's task force managed to isolate Escobar over time by dismantling his Medellin drug cartel, and round-the-clock electronic surveillance of the kingpin's radio communications eventually led the Colombian police to the safe house where the world's most-wanted man was killed in a shoot-out on Dec. Thirty of the 200 cops placed under Martinez's command were killed during the first two weeks of the manhunt, the colonel's family received numerous death threats and Escobar managed to elude capture for more than three years. In the fall of 1989 a Colombian police colonel named Hugo Martinez was given the thankless task of tracking down the notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar.
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